when you’re looking for light at the end of the tunnel {& free May Gratitude Calendar Printable}

How to find a thousand words for the joy of all this grace we walk in?

Everywhere, water running, rivulets, out to oceans.

Everywhere, light glinting.

There are sea gulls. And moss on trees in the woods. And rocks that take the relentless crashing and the spray, sentinels that stand for centuries, rooted.

And I walk with an old and radiant friend, along these margins along the edge, and there is the way His glory fills space and sky and sea — and her smile — but how to find words for all this?

Joy, it comes like this — a shimmering on depths, a shimmering of everything streaming past, a shimmering on all the moments strung together by a gratefulness to God.

We walk and talk for hours. We laugh. We cry.

We drive out the dark tunnel under the mountain by the sea, drive away from the sea, and just before we come out into the light at the end, I turn and see it written there on the tunnel wall, in a scrawl, in looping loveliness, only two words, what we’ll murmur at the end of all the tunnels, and I think then that maybe it’s not needed, a thousand words for the joy of all this grace?

Maybe only these two words that I could say a thousand times, everywhere, till I become them, enfold them, live them in a thousand, endless ways?

Save us, LORD our God, and gather us from the nations,

that we may give thanks to Your holy name and glory in Your praise. ~ Psalm 106:47

Today, if you’d like to share your own marking towards One Thousand Gifts of thanks, of making your life about thanks to God — (please, jump in!) — just add the direct URL to your specific 1000 gift list post… and if you join us, we humbly ask that you please help us find each other by sharing the community’s graphic within your post.